HOW TO: Change the RockSolid Backup Retention Settings

If you are using RockSolid to automate database backups, you can specify how many days backups to retain on disk. This is an important consideration that should be made within the context of your overall recovery strategy.

Within RockSolid you can specify two key settings relating to backup retention:

Backups to Retain: The number of days of backups to keep on disk in normal circumstances (i.e. not a low disk space condition).

Minimum Backups to Retain: The minimum number of days backups RockSolid can reduce the retention to automatically when experiencing a low disk space condition. This allows RockSolid to vary normal retention for the purpose of taking a current database backup.

Backup Retention

To change backup retention navigate to the appropriate level in your database hierarchy where the database settings recovery are defined. Typically this will be defined at the database bucket level, however you may also choose to override this at the database level.

Full Backup Retention

To change the full database backup retention, navigate to the relevant policy and click the Recovery tab.

Find the Backup Settings heading

Set the Full Backup Plan option to Yes

Set the Backups to Retain value to the number of days to retain under normal circumstances.

Set the Minimum Backups to Retain value to the minimum number of days under low disk space conditions.

NOTE: This setting does not specify the number of backup files to retain. It specifies the number of days backups to retain.

Log Backup Retention

To change the log database backup retention, navigate to the relevant policy and click the Recovery tab.

Find the Backup Settings heading

Set the Log Backup Plan option to Yes

Set the Hours to Retain value to the number of hours to retain log backups under normal circumstances.